Tuesday, 29 September 2015

Bit of an odd
post this time. A few days ago I ate something that disagreed with me – (no, it
wasn't a critic!) – and ever since then have been living in a land of pain and
toilets that no amount of imodium and erythromycin can seem to hold. And then
the night before last, just as I was thinking things were finally on the mend,
they instead took a sudden about turn and I became convinced somewhere in the
early hours of the morning that death wasn't such a bad thing. Dying is of
course a different matter! Naturally I'd feel sorrow for those I left behind.
For my family. For my cat who'd have to find someone else to look down upon
with disdain – though to be fair she's a cat and so has the entire world to
look down upon! For the coroner who might have to wear multiple gas masks to do
his work and then still be decontaminated! But really as the clock struck three
in the morning and the porcelain was begging for mercy, it still didn't seem so
bad.

Somewhere after
that though, a strange thought took hold of me – the understanding that
whatever I was suffering from couldn't be natural. It had to be new and
improved. A whole new class of diarrhoea. Something that would make the medical
texts. I could have a brand new disease named after me!

But then I
realised there are diseases and then there are diseases. I mean who wouldn't
want some cool disease named after them? Greg's Lycanthroposis for example
would be quite cool. Not a bad way to be remembered. Or some sort of hyper
mania perhaps. Greg died while trying to hurl a bus at police and was later
found to have over four hundred bullets in him! Greg's Hyper Rage! Now that
would be undeniably cool! By contrast I can only imagine that Gerhard Hansen
was infinitely glad that Hansen's Disease was never popularly known by that
name but rather simply as leprosy. Still even against that infamous horror
Greg's Pustulating Necrosis of the Gut would be a far less welcome memoriam.
And when the symptoms of GPNG are listed as the sufferer's choice of death
either by his insides suddenly deciding they wanted to become his outsides or
alternatively asphyxiating on his own flatulence, I can't imagine anyone ever
wanting to be associated with the condition. Least of all me.

Writing I think,
has a little in common with this. (There! You see? You knew there would be some
return to my more normal topics at some point since no one could talk about
diarrhoea forever! Not even me!)

My point is that
as authors we write books that people read, and will hopefully enjoy and
remember. And in a very real way some of these books may in fact become a
memoriam to us. More so now in this digital age where nothing is lost unlike
paper books which have vanished over the previous years and centuries.

Which leads me
to the rationale behind this post. (Yes there is one!) We all talk about the
need for quality in our work. For making sure that whatever we put out there is
the best that we can do. That it's beta read and edited to death. And that
certainly is important to us as authors; indie and trade, living and dead. But
before anyone pushes that publish button it occurs to me that there's another
question that we need to ask ourselves. Is this a work that I want to be
forever associated with me? In five years, ten years, twenty am I still going
to be proud to have published this work? Or am I going to be living down the
shame of having put it out there? Is this going to be a work that will forever
shine a glorious light upon me? Or will it be like those nude pictures you took
as an overweight teenager which eternally follow you around from job interview
to job interview? It needs to be considered.

Sure I may hate
(insert name of political movement or religion here) now, but in a decade am I
going to want to be remembered as the man who wrote the book accusing them of
promoting indecent acts? I may despise (insert persons name here) but in twenty
years time am I going to want to be known as the man who in public accused them
of various crimes? Especially if they're later shown to be innocent? Yes I may
support certain political ideologies but in twenty years when movements based
on my writings have caused immeasurable harm to the world, will I want to be
associated with them? Even recognised as their inspiration?

You think I'm
joking? Perhaps driven mad by the long nights spent curled up on a toilet seat,
gassing myself in the smallest room in the house? Sadly actually I'm not. Many
authors have ended up regretting their works and trying to have them pulled
from the shelves and for all sorts of reasons.

The list starts
with Stephen King who in 1997 tried to get his 1977 book Rage pulled when a
copy of it was found in the locker of a boy who went on a shooting spree in a
school. His fear was that the book inspired the act.

At the more
minor end of the spectrum Octavia Butler tried to have Survivor pulled for a
completely different reason. Though it was well written, edited and
professional and indeed readers loved the book, to her it was clichéd and trope
ridden.

And of course
you would have to wonder how Nietzsche would have felt had he lived to see the
rise of the Nazi's. He had a vision of his ubermen as modern equivalents of
ancient Greek gods striding across the world. To see instead the reality of
death camps, genocide, unbridled ambition and a world in flames all inspired by
his work would probably have had him spinning in his grave.

Which brings me
back to my point. We live in a digital age. Whatever we publish will be with us
potentially forever – or at least for the rest of our lives. And once you push
that button there's no way to unpush it. So take a moment. Give it a little
thought. Have a cuppa or two before doing what you can't undo. And ask yourself
that vital question:

Is this going to
be your hyper rage? Or your pustulating necrosis of the gut?

Friday, 11 September 2015

First up,
apologies as usual for not having posted for so long. Unfortunately my muse
kidnapped me – it does that sometimes – and said “head down, bum up, you've got
a book to write boy!” Oh to be a plotter and not a pantster! One day I'll make
that switch. Not this month though.

The upshot is
that on the fifth of August having finally got The Arcanist published and
thinking I should enjoy a bit of a break, I started Spaced. And last night just
before the witching hour I sent the completed first draft of the space opera off. 157K
in a month and six days! Maybe this year I finally should enter Nanowrimo!

Anyway, that's
been my life for the last month or so, which is why I haven't done a hell of a
lot else. But now that I've regained my freedom and the use of my poor,
overworked fingers, I thought I'd turn my attention to other things. And first
up, before I start editing the third Wizard at Law book which returned from my
editor last month as well and got pushed to one side, I thought I'd answer a
question that keeps coming up among new writers. So you've written your book –
do you go Indie or Trade?

This is
obviously not an easy question to answer. In fact there is no right answer.
It's going to depend completely on who you are as a writer and who you want to
be as an author. And strangely even the premise – that you've written a book –
is going to change depending on the answer. So to begin.

First you've
written a book. This means I assume that you've done everything you possibly
can to get that book in the best possible shape. You've drafted and redrafted
it. Hunted for mistakes and plot holes. It is as close to error free as you can
possibly get it. But the one thing that you haven't done is send it away to an
editor.

This is actually
the next step in your journey – if you go indie. If you instead try to get a
trade deal – it isn't. The guts of it is simple, and it comes down to that most
base of all motivations – filthy lucre. If you decide to try and pursue a trade
deal with an agent or a publisher then your work should not be edited. The
reason is that most new authors getting signed get very small advances – less
than five thousand dollars and then at least half of them never earn out their
advance. (Sorry to shatter any dreams of wealth you may have but writers are by
and large very poorly paid whichever route they take.)

(Which brings up
another pet peeve – pirates. Grief I get sick of hearing from those who support
piracy that all books should be free. It is practically a mantra for the
criminally insane. These people believe they are doing some sort of Robin Hood
type thing. They aren't. In fact they are doing the exact opposite. They're
stealing from the poor and giving to those who have more than enough money to
spend on a book. So well done guys!)

Anyway I've
wandered down that path enough for the moment. Back to the main thread and the
point I was making. If you submit to agents and get a trade deal, the chances
of striking gold – which really you've already struck by getting your deal –
are small. But the one thing every agent / publisher will provide for free to
their writers – is writing services. That means editing and book covering etc.
So the last thing you want to be doing is paying hundreds or thousands of
dollars for an edit which you'll get for free if you get a deal.

If on the other
hand you decide to go indie – bad luck guys. Every book needs to be edited and
the bill is yours. So your first guideline in making this decision is a simple
one – do you have the money to pay for editing and cover design etc? If yes
then you can go either route. If no, then trade is your only option.

Okay, so next up
in your decision tree as you sit there with your book should be your skills in
other areas. Do you understand things like cover design, marketing, formatting
and how to do publishing? If not are you willing to learn? Because make no
mistake, going indie is a decision that will necessitate you knowing all of
these things. Anyone as they say can self-publish. But doing it well is far
harder. To be a successfully indie involves a very steep learning curve.

So here comes
your next question in your decision tree. Do you have these skills? Are you
willing to learn them? If yes, then you can take either route. If no, then
again trade is your only possible route.

Next on our
list, you need to consider commercialism – yes I know – more filthy lucre. But
here it's not actually about the money. It's about the selling. And you need to
consider this one question before you make your decision – will people buy it?

Yeah I know,
it's a difficult thing to guess. But there are some things that will help guide
you. First think of the genre. There are some genres that sell better than
others – paranormal romance for example is hot these days. Bead work from the
1900's is not. There's also the question of how original it is. Yes everyone
says they're looking for the next fresh idea. But they aren't. If you want your
best chance to sell you want to stick closely to something that's already out
there with just a few tweaks. So maybe your sparkly vampires have a silver
sheen instead of gold? But they aren't born literally legless and forced to
spend their lives in wheelchairs!

So take a step
back from your work and ask yourself, how original is it? And how important is
it to you that it's original? If this is something that's wildly new – and I'd
like to take this opportunity to thank the five people who bought The Man Who
Wasn't Anders Voss!!! – indie is really your only option. Almost no agents and no
publishers are going to pick it up. They're there to make money and that means
selling.

Yes I know –
you're all going to yell Fifty Shades at me, and it is true. There are a few
exceptions to this rule. But they are just that – exceptions.

Next on the
decision tree is what Hollywood likes to call creative control. You've written
a book. You're proud of it. It's your baby. Are you willing to let other people
mangle it? Yes I know they won't actually mangle it – mostly. But what I
consider mangling and what you consider mangling are likely to be very
different things. And what I can accept in terms of changes and what you can
accept are equally likely to be very different.

There's an old
story – not sure if it's true – that Disney once hired a consultant to advise
them on Donald's nephews. And the consultants came back and said well you can
save money by removing a button on their shirts which will be quicker to draw.
Disney said yes. Then the consultants said – does he really need three nephews?
Two would be easier to draw. At which point they were sacked.

That in a nut
shell is the question you need to ask. How much can you compromise on your
artistic vision? If the answer is no more than a few typo's corrected, indie is
your choice. If on the other hand it's “hell yes, let it rip – I didn't need to
have that character anyway”, then trade may well be a better option for you.
I'm not saying that that's what they will do, just that compromise is far more
important for someone going the trade route than it is for an indie.

Last of course
on our decision tree, we come back to that age old conundrum – filthy lucre.
You've written your book. You're proud of it. You want to sell it and make some
money. (Let's leave the dreams of castles and jets to one side here and think
about things like paying the rent.) Which option is more likely to achieve your
objective of keeping a roof over your head?

The truth of the
matter is that no one really knows. The surveys of author income all show that
trade published authors do better on annual income – though no one really does
well. But the surveys are also wrong because they compare apples to oranges.
They forget that people don't choose to go trade. They choose to try and go
trade. And there is absolutely nothing you can do to make an agent or a
publisher pick up your book. For every author who submits to agents and
publishers and gets a trade deal there are probably hundreds who submit and get
nothing – not even a reply. When you factor that into your calculations
suddenly the likely income favours the indie in a big way.

But then comes
the next big shovel in the face – and this ones for indies. Surveys all show
that the vast majority of self published books don't sell. They get released,
no one buys them and they fall to the bottom of the slush pile. There are any
number of reasons for this – I've discussed a few here – but the biggest one by
far is that an incredible number of writers simply get to the end of their book
– think to themselves “this is genius” – slap a cover photo on it and think
they're done. They don't do the hard yards of editing and format, cover design,
blurb work, beta reading and marketing. And then they no doubt wonder why their
book doesn't sell. Obviously the world just wasn't ready for their brilliance!

Yeah right!!!

Anyway, to get
back to the point. If you aren't willing to do all those hard yards – indie is
not for you. I don't know that any agent would pick up your work either but you
are fairly much guaranteed to fail as an indie.

And to the other
point – filthy lucre and keeping your roof over your head – my own thought is
that for the average author who is willing to put in all that extra effort to
get their books beyond the standard poorly written self published novel indie
is the better financial option these days.

Having said
that, both are viable options and you should carefully consider all the pros
and cons before deciding what's right for you.

But one last
thing. For those who decide to try and get a trade deal – set yourself a cut
off. So many unsuccessful submissions sent. So many months or “shudder!” years
spent on the agent-go-round. Then go indie.

You're a writer.
Writing is a communicative art. If you're not communicating, you're failing
yourself. You actually need to publish however you can, to complete your
journey as a writer.

WELCOME

Hi, I'm Greg and welcome to my blog.

Please do make yourself at home and feel free to make comments about my posts. Down the bottom of the blog you'll find the covers of my ebooks, and with a little luck, clicking on them will bring you directly to them in Amazon, where you can read a little more about them.

Hope you have a good time and come back soon. I'll try to keep writing blogs as well as books.

Cheers.

Author Pic

About Me

Hi, What can I say about me?
Well I suppose first and foremost I'm a lover of science fiction and fantasy and a little horror. I have been since I was a child and discovered among other things, Star Trek. (Yes I'm a trekkie!)
Since all I read and watch is sci fi and fantasy, that's also what I write. So please don't expect to find books on auto-mechanics. (And if you did I wouldn't trust them since I can barely hold a wrench the right way round!)
Other then that I am also a fan of philosophy, and maybe one day I'll write a book putting my views about the Kalem Cosmological Argument - it's sure to bore everyone!